How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, 2020 edition, reviewed

Review of How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners Lee. Available from Amazon here.

How Bad Are Bananas? was a groundbreaking book when first published in 2009, when most of us were hearing the phrase ‘carbon footprint’ for the first time. Mike Berners-Lee set out to inform us what was important (aviation, heating, swimming pools) and what made very little difference (bananas, naturally packaged, are good!).

This new edition updates all the figures (from data centres to hosting a World Cup) and introduces many areas that have become a regular part of modern life – Twitter, the Cloud, Bitcoin, electric bikes and cars, even space tourism. Berners-Lee runs a considered eye over each area and gives us the figures to manage and reduce our own carbon footprint, as well as to lobby our companies, businesses and government. His findings, presented in clear and even entertaining prose, are often surprising. And they are essential if we are to address climate change.

How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, 2020 edition, reviewed

This is a fun, and yet also deadly serious book. Updated and rewritten for 2020, to factor in changes in the relative impact of, well, everything, in terms of its carbon footprint. The book is written in a smart, informative, and accessible way. It also makes you look at all aspects of your life and what you do, and its impact on the planet. If you want the high-level summary and the biggest way to have a positive impact, don’t fly, stop flying, and if you can’t do that, then greatly reduce the number of flights you make.

Pretty much everything else you do pales into comparison in relation to flying, though new laptops are of course a big impact too. However, the book takes you along a whole series of other things that have an impact, even down to receiving emails. This immediately inspired me to realise that simply deleting junk email is less effective than unsubscribing to those updates that you endlessly get without ever having consciously signed up to them.

From emails at one end of the spectrum to flying at the other end the book walks you through the relative impact of a wide range of things that we do in our lives. Children are naturally a big impact too, though we can’t exactly hand them back, so we do have a responsibility to do what we can to raise them to be aware of what we do, and how we live our lives. This is a great book to have, and makes a good christmas stocking filler, yes it will trigger some impact on your carbon footprint but if it makes you aware of the bigger impacts you can avoid making then it will be money well spent.

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